


Forget Me Not

by RobberBaroness



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Black Lodge, Dreams, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, don't have to know season 3, gratuitous references to great Lauras of literature, some references to the movie/books/season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 06:23:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16718035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/pseuds/RobberBaroness
Summary: When Cooper forgot his dream, Laura started visiting others.





	Forget Me Not

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justnightvalethings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justnightvalethings/gifts).



Albert had read a million different works on medical history, forensic history, mortuary history, psychiatric history. He knew the fields were ever evolving from barbarities to indulgences and back again, and had even subjected himself to a number of different therapies in the hopes of treating his aggression. (Mixed success on that front.) Even in his dream, he could recognize the mismatched eras of equipment, all the devices with which men of the past had attempted to treat madness. The desk before him was littered with instruments of trepanning and pelvic massage, decorating a Victorian office room in which he sat upon the stereotypical analysts’ chair. And on the stereotypical analysts’ couch sat the blonde girl, wrapped in something that was at once a straightjacket and an antique lace nightgown.

“I’m Anne,” she said, in a horrible, broken radio voice. “That’s what they call me.”

“You’re Laura Palmer,” said Albert, slowly and deliberately. Dreams meant little to him, but nevertheless he was not going to allow himself to be lied to in one. Cooper was the one with the visions; he was just a man running through the events of a partial autopsy, reconstructed here on the couch all in white.

“I said to them I was Laura,” came the answer, “but they say Laura is someone else. They say if I am locked away I will remember.” She leaned forward, and despite her restraints she managed to weave her body like a snake dangerously close to touching him. 

“Will you remember me?” she asked. “If I don’t remember me, will you do it for me?” And she had a flower in her teeth, leaning forward for an angry kiss, then simply gnashing her teeth at him so the flower was the last thing he saw.

Red and white and blue: the heavy red tapestry of the walls, the white of Laura’s nightgown, the blue of the flower. A very American nightmare.

When Albert awoke in the unbearably quaint wooden bedroom of the Great Northern Hotel, he found a small blue flower on the pillow beside him. Blue rose, he thought, but no — not a rose. Nothing so neat and tidy as that.

He’d brought something back from a dream. Cooper was never going to let him live this one down.

***

The bedroom Audrey dreamed of was not her own, though it bore the frills and laces of her girlhood. There had been a time when her parents gave her enough thought to bother spoiling her, but it hadn’t lasted into her teen years. And this room was obviously one belonging to a teenage girl.

She had never been allowed to paint the walls of her room red. Her mother said it would be too much. Looking around the oppressive red bedroom, red from canopies to drapes, she had to admit that maybe her mother had been right.

It occurred to Audrey that she might be dreaming when she looked at the bed beneath the red canopy and saw something that looked like Laura Palmer. At first she wasn’t sure because of all the black fur piled in the middle of the bed, but there the girl was, pinned down by an immense black cat.

Laura opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a suffocated wheeze. Audrey was reminded of the legend of cats stealing breath from the sleeping, but when she tried to shoo the great black cat away her arms felt too heavy to move.

But Laura was talking, if Audrey listened closely. It sounded wrong, like a scratched-up record, but there were discernible words straining from her lips.

“The letters can be rearranged,” she said. “Backwards and forwards. It spells a name, either way.”

“What name?” Audrey asked. In her waking life, conversations with Laura had been few and awkward; she’d been jealous of something she could not bring herself to articulate. She was not jealous now, watching her wasting form sink beneath the oppressive visiting animal.

“The letters in her name. His name. Its name. The thing that eats daughters and hides in the forest.” Her voice sounded less like a whisper now and more like a prayer recited from memory by a child unsure of its meaning.

“Backwards and forwards, so that we can remember. Will you remember?” Laura looked up and Audrey’s eyes followed, looking at the little hanging flowers tied to the canopy. Small and blue amid the sea of red.

“Will you remember the name?” Laura said, and although Audrey reached out to her one more time, she awoke clutching her own bedpost with something crumpled in her hand.

A small blue flower. That was something she could tell Cooper about.

***

Donna had never lived in an apartment in her life, but here she was in a well-furnished suite, shades of red turned to shadows by the light peaking through the blinds. And although it was no room she had ever seen, she felt like she knew whose it was, simply by looking at the objects around her. Pictures. Letters. A necklace. And a great portrait hung above a fireplace, with Laura in her golden glory.

Not another fucking Laura dream, Donna thought. It was guilt or love or simply sorrow, but for one or all of those reasons she knew her friend had been making appearances in her dreams, leaving only the faintest trace — a photo negative — behind when she awoke. She swore she would remember this one, and indeed, it already felt more solid than any other.

“Is it a good likeness?” came something that sounded like a distortion of Laura, a voice fed through some terrible filter. When Donna turned, there Laura stood, her neat little business suit the only thing to differentiate her from her portrait.

“Laura,” Donna whispered. “Laura, you’re dead.”

“If Laura is dead, then who is in that portrait?” Laura set down a smart little hat decorated with a small blue flower pinned to the brim. “Do you remember?”

Donna reached out, trying to will her frozen feet to take her the few steps that would bring her to Laura. Laura, Laura, dead and alive, in the portrait and in the flesh, and still so far away. When she reached out, all she could clutch was the little blue flower tucked into the brim of the old-fashioned hat, and she awoke to the sound of the distorted words, “Do you remember?”

She remembered. This dream was forever sketched into her mind by the blue flowers she held when she awoke. Dazed and lost, knowing she had to tell someone but not knowing who, Donna stumbled out of bed and tried to think.

***

At the Double R, Dale Cooper was confronted over his coffee by three faces — Albert, Audrey and Donna. No one wanted to be the first to talk. (Even Albert’s brusqueness was tempered by the reality of talking over two teenage girls.) When nobody proceeded to speak, he motioned for them to join his table.

First Audrey, then Donna, and finally an embarrassed-looking Albert placed identical blue flowers on the table. Dale’s thoughts of the Blue Rose subsided with the light scent of the flowers.

“Myosotis,” he said. “Forget-me-nots. The state flower of Alaska. They don’t usually give off scent in the daytime.”

“I didn’t get it in the daytime,” said Donna. She looked over at Albert and Audrey. “I guess you two know what I’m talking about.”

Dale picked up the flowers, one by one, trying to recall where he had last encountered the scent. A woman’s perfume, maybe, or one of his nature meditations. And then he closed his eyes and felt the scent of the flower descend on him like a cloud, issuing off a golden woman in a red room as she leaned in to him and whispered a secret.

“I forgot,” he said. “And you three remembered.”

And when he spoke again, it was in the broken whisper of a girl in a dream, once lost and now brought back from the depths of lethe, the forgetful waters of Hades.

He only spoke four words in that voice, and only the three dreamers heard him.

“My father killed me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my beta skazka!
> 
> Laura Palmer is visiting dreams in the forms of, respectively, Laura Fairlie, Laura of Styria, and Laura Hunt.


End file.
